Kidnapped Journalist, Apparently Executed by ISIS (NBC News)
The Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) claims to have beheaded an American photojournalist and has threatened the life of another American journalist if President Obama doesn’t stop airstrikes in Iraq. TVNewser In a gruesome video, James Wright Foley, a freelance journalist for Global Post, is apparently beheaded by ISIS militants. The militants claim they are also holding journalist Steven Soltoff. HuffPost The YouTube video and photos purportedly of Foley emerged on Tuesday. Titled “A Message to #America (from the #IslamicState),” the video identified a man on his knees as “James Wright Foley” and showed his beheading. “This is James Wright Foley, an American citizen of your country,” an Islamic State militant says in the video, which has since been removed by YouTube. “As a government, you have been at the forefront of the aggression towards the Islamic State. You have plotted against us and have gone far out of your way to find reasons to interfere in our affairs. Today, your military air force is attacking us daily in Iraq, your strikes have caused casualties among Muslims.” Politico / Dylan Byers on Media Foley disappeared in northwest Syria on November 22, 2012. The White House said they have not yet confirmed the authenticity of the video. NYT In Washington, a National Security Council spokeswoman, Caitlin Hayden, said in a statement: “We have seen a video that purports to be the murder of U.S. citizen James Foley by ISIL. The intelligence community is working as quickly as possible to determine its authenticity. If genuine, we are appalled by the brutal murder of an innocent American journalist,” she said, using an alternative name for ISIS.

Condé Nast to Sell Fairchild Fashion Media for $100 Million (NYT)
Condé Nast announced on Tuesday the sale of Fairchild Fashion Media, a group of trade publications including Women’s Wear Daily and Footwear News, to Penske Media. The sale price was about $100 million, according to a person briefed on the deal. FishbowlNY Also in the mix would be men’s quarterly M. Earlier this year, Jim Windolf joined that publication as editor. Capital New York Fairchild’s consumer brands, Style.com and NowManifest, an ad sales network for popular fashion blogs, will remain a part of Condé Nast. The publisher has been in reorganization mode as of late. Last week, it spun off Lucky magazine as a joint venture with the Web retailer BeachMint. Adweek Existing Fairchild staffers will move to Penske when the deal closes next month, but Condé did not specify whether any employees would be expected to relocate to Penske’s Los Angeles headquarters. Penske Media owns upwards of 20 media brands, including Deadline.com, HollywoodLife and Variety, which it purchased early last year.

Uber Lands Former Obama Campaign Manager David Plouffe (FishbowlDC)
David Plouffe, the former campaign manager of President Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential bid, was named SVP of policy and strategy for Uber Tuesday. TVNewser Plouffe will be in charge of global branding, communications and policy at the app-based car-for-hire company. Politico Plouffe will commute for now but will move to San Francisco with his wife, Olivia Morgan, and their two children in summer 2015. Plouffe, who has been advising major technology and communications companies since leaving the West Wing after Obama’s reelection, said in an interview that the new job is analogous to his role as Obama’s 2008 campaign manager and then White House senior adviser. WSJ / Digits The role is a crucial one for Uber, a four-year-old company that is tangling with lawmakers, state and local regulators, and city taxi commissions in dozens of cities around the world, where the legal status of ride-sharing apps is still unclear. Plouffe’s experience on the campaign trail, and his role as Obama’s top adviser from 2011 to 2013, could also help Uber improve its image. Travis Kalanick, Uber’s sharp-tongued CEO, has come under fire recently for speaking his mind in interviews and sparring with critics on Twitter. FishbowlDC Shortly after yesterday’s announcement, Plouffe and Kalanick were guests on Bloomberg Television’s Street Smart. Bloomberg’s Trish Regan opened by asking Kalanick about his hiring of Plouffe, a recent Bloomberg TV correspondent, and what he’ll be doing in his role, and Plouffe, how he’ll leverage national campaign management experience on a global scale.

More of The Same in Ferguson (FishbowlNY)
Another day of protests in Ferguson, Missouri; another day of reporters getting harassed, threatened and arrested by police. Monday night, Getty Images photographer Scott Olson and The Intercept’s Ryan Devereaux were both arrested while covering the tense situation. Olson has been released and Devereaux was expected to be freed Tuesday — with no charges, of course. TVNewser During a live 11 p.m. ET edition of All In from Ferguson Monday night, protestors threw rocks at Chris Hayes. Two rocks were hurled at Hayes, one deflected by Craig Melvin, who was reporting alongside his MSNBC colleague. “Tell the true story,” one protestor shouted. “You know, we are telling the true story,” Melvin shot back. “People are angry,” Hayes added. Mediaite The turmoil was captured live on CNN as stun grenades and tear gas flew towards Jake Tapper, Don Lemon and their CNN crew. While attempting to clear protestors out of the street shortly after midnight, the riot police launched the canisters, sending reporters scurrying off to the side while several protestors remained in the thick smoke. Tapper put on his gas mask and Lemon, having thought to have heard gun shots, immediately secured a bulletproof vest while describing the scene that had just unfolded.

Fareed Zakaria Rebuts Plagiarism Charges (Politico / Dylan Byers on Media)
Fareed Zakaria sought to dismiss new plagiarism allegations on Tuesday after an anonymous report cited 12 instances in which the veteran foreign policy journalist appeared to lift passages from other news outlets and websites. “These are all facts, not someone else’s writing or opinions or expressions,” Zakaria wrote in an email. He also referred to the majority of instances as “cases in my writing where I have cited a statistic that also appeared somewhere else,” suggesting that he had merely repeated readily available information. In some cases, he said he referred to the primary source or took quotes from an interview subject, not from other news reports. HuffPost The allegations come from the same anonymous sources who called out BuzzFeed’s Benny Johnson for plagiarism last month. Those accusations led to Johnson’s eventual firing. Zakaria was first accused of plagiarism in 2012 for lifting parts of Jill Lepore’s New Yorker essay for a column in Time. He apologized and called the incident “a terrible mistake.” Poynter / MediaWireTime will review Zakaria’s work after Twitter users @blippoblappo and @crushingbort accused the CNN journalist of lifting from a variety of publications, including Vanity Fair, Businessweek and the New Yorker. Time magazine “takes the accusations seriously,” according to a statement from Daniel Kile, vice president of communications for Time Inc.

Afghan Officials Interrogate a Times Correspondent (NYT)
The Afghan attorney general’s office called in a New York Times correspondent for questioning Tuesday, and later barred him from leaving the country, after the Times published an article about discussions among some officials of imposing an interim government. HuffPost A spokesperson for the Afghan attorney general’s office confirmed the travel ban to the Times, saying that it is in effect “until this issue over this article is resolved.” The spokesperson also said that Matthew Rosenberg, who works out of the newspaper’s Kabul bureau, will be asked to reveal his sources. Capital New York Rosenberg published a story Monday reporting that Afghan officials were eyeing a temporary governing committee in the wake of a recent elections impasse. A travel ban was subsequently instituted. In a separate statement, foreign editor Joe Kahn said the Times is “eager to work with the Afghan authorities to resolve any concerns about the article, which we feel is fair and accurate.”

Ratings: CNN Wins Primetime, Total Day Demo (TVNewser)
CNN won in the A25-54 demographic Monday in both total day and primetime, delivering 356,000 and 423,000 viewers, respectively. Fox News, second in both measurements, had 302,000 total day viewers and 405,000 primetime viewers in the demo. MSNBC was third and HLN was fourth. Mediaite The ratings peak for CNN actually came during the 12 midnight ET hour, when the network averaged 706K in the demo and 1.334M total viewers. Fox’s ratings peak was The Kelly File at 9 p.m. with 411K in demo and 2.4M total viewers.

Al Jazeera Calls Al Gore Lawsuit ‘Ordinary Commercial Dispute’ (WSJ)
Al Jazeera America said it rejects the claims of Al Gore and Joel Hyatt, the co-founders of Current TV, who have sued the Qatar-backed broadcaster for withholding money from their channel’s sale to Al Jazeera. “The lawsuit and statement simultaneously issued by Al Gore’s celebrity trial lawyer were designed to grab headlines with misleading accusations like ‘fraud’ and ‘price discount,'” Al Jazeera said in a release on Tuesday, adding that the tussle is an “ordinary commercial dispute.” Variety Al Jazeera argues that Gore and Hyatt gave “inaccurate” assurances that Current TV was not in breach of contracts, forcing Al Jazeera to file claims against an escrow account holding funds to cover indemnification. Gore and Hyatt filed suit on Friday against Al Jazeera, suggesting that the news channel was seeking a price discount from their purchase of Current TV in January 2013, reportedly for $500 million.

Netflix is Now Paying Time Warner Cable for Direct Access and Faster Streams (GigaOM)
Time Warner Cable signed a direct interconnection deal with Netflix. Presumably, this agreement should improve the Netflix viewing experience of Time Warner Cable’s broadband subscribers who also like to tune in to Netflix fare. Variety The deal follows similar deals with Comcast, AT&T and Verizon. The No. 1 streaming service, which represents about one-third of all downstream Internet traffic in North America, now has deals with the country’s top four broadband providers, representing about 68 percent of all high-speed Internet subscribers in the United States.

Politico Launches Defense Tweet Hub (FishbowlDC)Politico announced Tuesday the launch of its Defense Tweet Hub, a look at conversation pertaining to defense policy, weapons programs and the Pentagon budget on Twitter. The three-panel deck pulls Twitter commentary from 300+ defense reporters, influencers and policy makers, including Kevin Baron, executive editor of Defense One; WSJ’s Dion Nissenbaum; WaPo’s Dan Lamothe; the Council on Foreign Relations; and the United States Mission to NATO. Defense is the third topic area to be explored as a tweet hub by Politico. In November, it launched Energy Insider Tweet Hub, followed by Technology Tweet Hub.

Nora Zimmett Named SVP of Programming at The Weather Channel (TVNewser)
Nora Zimmett has been named senior vice president of live programming at The Weather Channel. Zimmett joins the network from CNN, where she was most recently the co-creator and executive producer of the weekend edition of New Day and Smerconish. Prior to working at CNN, Zimmett worked at Bloomberg TV and Fox News. In her new role, she will be based in Atlanta.

Kensington Publishing Teams With Books-A-Million on eBooks (GalleyCat)
Kensington Publishing Corp. has formed a new partnership with book retailer Books-A-Million to launch a new program that will bring digital titles to print for the first time. Through the Lyrical High Notes program, select titles from the publisher’s digital imprint will be published as special edition trade paperbacks for sale for a limited period exclusively at Books-A-Million. The books will cost $12.95 each.

Anti-Marijuana Ad: Weed Cookies Will Cause Date Rape (Mediaite)
In November, Florida will vote on whether to legalize medical marijuana or not, and unsurprisingly, this is a very popular ballot initiative. The opponents of Amendment 2, however, do not want marijuana to be legal. Why? Because according to them, marijuana makes people susceptible to rape. And people can put marijuana into baked goods. So really, they’re stopping the women of Florida from ingesting rape cakes. No joke. An actual ad that advocacy group Vote No on Amendment 2 handed out featured a man, with marijuana cookies stuffed in his back pocket, embracing a woman; the copy read: “Will the new face of ‘Date Rape’ look like a Cookie?”

Turner CEO Tells Staff to Expect Layoffs (Capital New York)
In a memo sent to all Turner Broadcasting employees Tuesday morning, Turner CEO John Martin said that, as part of the company’s “Turner 2020″ plan, the company will unveil a new corporate structure “in the next two months.” Martin suggested that there will be organizational changes and layoffs across the entire company, which includes CNN, TNT, TBS, Turner Sports and Cartoon Network, among other channels.

Sky News Coverage of Malaysia Airlines Crash Leads to Investigation (THR)
U.K. media watchdog Ofcom will launch an investigation into Sky News’ coverage of the crash of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, which drew more than 200 complaints from viewers after reporter Colin Brazier rummaged through the luggage of a dead passenger. The organization said it received complaints after the July 20 live report from the crash site in the Ukraine, during which Brazier went through the luggage.

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